Day 17 – The Mighty Pen and Microsoft Word 2013

Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet
3/28/2013 

Welcome to Day 17 of working with a Microsoft Surface Pro Windows 8 tablet for educators. Today I would like to bring your attention to one of the magical features of the Microsoft Surface Pro, the mighty Pen.

I will start with an unlikely application in discussing the digital Pen, Word 2013.

The Surface Pro comes standard with a digital stylus that allows for the input of “digital ink”. The digital Pen allows for you to write on the Surface Pro just like the analog equivalent of pen and paper. The digital Pen feels fairly natural as it glides across the glass of the Surface Pro. This is the best writing experience I have had using a tablet.

The Pen can also be used as an input device like a mouse when you need really precise and accurate selection. I mentioned yesterday that I sometimes use the digital stylus for Desktop applications because the touch targets of Desktop applications are often too small for using your finger for selection.

There is a button on the Pen that if you depress it while selecting something acts as a right mouse click. Another helpful feature is that you can use the Pen as an eraser if you turn it upside down, very handy.

The digital Pen features 1024 levels of pressure that you can use to vary the weight of your pen strokes. Press with a heavy hand and you get bold thick lines, a lighter touch will feather out the pen stoke

Many artists are finding the built-in Wacom technology of great benefit and are using the Surface Pro to create artwork. The link below is from a YouTube video demonstrating an artist inking a cartoon using the Surface Pro. Notice the varying widths of the lines being drawn as the artist varies the pressure used on the Pen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puyMmARTqck

This digital inking makes the Surface Pro a breakout product for artists and the $999 price tag suddenly seems like a bargain compared to the thousands of dollars artists often spend on other digital tablets like the Cintiq.

Digital ink also offers several advantages, chief among them is the ability to immediately share your digital creations with the world using Skydrive or some other digital sharing service. Need a different color of Pen, no problem, you have a choice of thousands of colors, along with many different styles and widths of pens and highighters.

Now, for a secret use of Word 2013 for teachers using the Surface Pro.

It is very easy to use the Surface Pro and Word 2013 together as a digital whiteboard when you connect the Surface Pro to a projector or HDTV. Of course, you could also use OneNote and I will be discussing OneNote in a future post. I just want to point out the incredible flexibility teachers can now have access to with the Surface Pro and encourage you to explore new and innovative uses.

Here is how the magic works. When you take the digital Pen that comes with the Surface Pro and bring the tip of the digital pen close to the Word 2013 menu tabs along the top of the screen you will see a new tab appear that says “Ink Tools – Pens”.

The digital stylus activates the “Ink Tools” option and since Word 2013 is “pen-enabled” you essentially have a blank document that you would normally start typing words but why not consider it a blank slate like a whiteboard? Best of all your digital notes can be saved as a Word document of PDF and posted or emailed for your students.

The obvious choice of using a Pen while in Word 2013 is for marking student work. It works great inking over students work submitted in Word. Since you can save your ink notes alone with the student’s original document you can have a 100% paperless workflow while still using traditional handwritten comments. Just save the marked up copy under a different filename and return to the student either as a Word document or PDF. This works great for online learning management systems like BlackBoard, WebCT, Desire2Learn, or Canvas…

I have provided screenshots below. The first shows the normal menu tabs across the top of Word 2013. The second and third, is a screenshot that illustrates the new “Ink Tools” menu option that appears when you bring the Pen close to the Surface Pro that activates the additional “Ink Tools” options. The fourth shows some digital inking in Word 2013.

 

 

 

The Surface Pro takes advantage of over a decade of practical research that Microsoft has developed through the Tablet PC days and this research is now paying off in the features of the Surface Pro.

Having a digital stylus takes your work to the next level and eliminates some of the deficiencies of capacitive touch screens that only allow finger input. Having the precision of pen input is very beneficial for teachers.

Until next time...
Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, PhD

 Follow me on Twitter @tomgrissom

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